Could CIA nominee Gina Haspel be prosecuted for war crimes?

There are two legal avenues for a case against Haspel. The first is the International Criminal Court (ICC), and the second is a domestic court of a European nation.

The ICC is a better fit conceptually. Its entire purpose is to prosecute people for “genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and aggression.” And despite legal counsel provided to the Bush administration at the time, the kinds of torture which Haspel supervised when she oversaw a CIA “black site” in Thailand are almost certainly violations of the UN Convention against Torture.

Mary Ellen O’Connell, professor of international law at Notre Dame Law School, told The Daily Beast that Haspel “clearly broke the law… Every member of the CIA is aware that the U.S. is a party to the Convention against Torture. Even members of the military would have had the duty to disobey a manifestly unlawful order from superiors to use torture.”